As electric vehicles seem to increase their market share in the next few years, alternative energy companies think of methods to store the excess power produced during the night, when electricity utilities don’t buy their energy, because of reduced consumption.
One such place to store the energy would be the electric and hybrid cars’ batteries. Mitsubishi, along with the Tokyo Institute of Technology have proposed a method to do this. It looks just like the U.S.-based V2G.
The power supplied by their system to a charging vehicle can be stopped and restarted in increments of a second. They even did a real life test in Hokkaido.
The 3,000 kW that a large wind mill can produce can charge 200, to 300 EVs a night. The system also manages the volume of remaining power in each vehicle, to distribute it evenly along the network.
This technology is best to be commercialized in places where wind turbines are near and where usual travel distances are perfect for electric cars – on islands, for example.